Daily Archives: May 22, 2017

Since virtual-reality entertainment began gaining currency several years ago, two key questions (among many) have emerged: Will the mainstream film community embrace it? And what form will that embrace take?

The first question is increasingly heading to an emphatic yes. That point has been underscored over the past few days at the Cannes Film Festival, where organizers for the first time invited a VR project to its official selection: a piece by Alejandro G. Irritu, the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant.

Titled Carne y Arena, the project has both Hollywood bona fides it is partly funded by the studio heavyweight Legendary Entertainment and the stamp of the art house community, for which Cannes is a holy site.

Answers to the second question about form, however, remain far more ambiguous.

Installed in an airplane hangar about 20 minutes outside of town, Carne y Arena tells the story of Latin American immigrants who are attempting to cross into the United States via the Arizona desert when they are spotted and caught by U.S. authorities. Irritu and his frequent cinematography collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, who goes by Chivo, located real people who suffered the torturous journey and had them reenact it on camera; they then shot their stories with VR's 360-degree sweep and in-your-face urgency.

Until you feel it until you feel what it's like to be 20 years old, not left wing or right wing or any wing you can't really talk about it.

Alejandro G. Irritu, director of the VR project 'Carne y Arena'

(A version of the piece will come this summer to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where its expected to run for several months, welcoming one museum patron at a time and making the five to seven people allowed into the precipitation portion of Rain Room seem like a flash mob. Carne also will open in a few weeks at the Fondazione Prada in Milan; the arts institution was a backer as well.)

Viewers experience the film in a highly curatorial way. The piece is flanked by an art installation on-screen testimony, a reconstructed holding pen while the movie itself is a walking VR piece that allows viewers to wander around the desert at will (or at least as much as the room, a sand-strewn space the size of several volleyball courts, allows).

Displayed in an Oculus Rift headset, the six-minute piece begins with a desperate group of immigrants straggling into sight, led by their "coyote" smugglers. But the windswept quiet is soon jolted by the sight (or heavens-rattling sound) of a military helicopter. In an instant, the terrain is turned into a Children of Men-style horror show. As guns are pointed and orders barked, the immigrants drop to their knees. So too can a curious viewer, if he or she chooses; the virtue of VR is the ability to walk up to and around a film's subjects, almost like one holds an invisibility force field.

This is very different from the rhetoric and the politics, Irritu said in a joint interview with Chivo at the festival Sunday. Until you feel it until you feel what it's like to be 20 years old, not left wing or right wing or any wing going through something like this, you can't really talk about it.

The subject matter is not new to VR. Border stories have been explored for years by many of the medium's preeminent filmmakers (especially the former USC pioneer Nonny de la Pea), so the air of novelty put forth by those promoting the project will be met by VR veterans with a measure of skepticism.

What Irritu has done differently is offer a sense of scope and scale much like a studio director who adapts the techniques of an independent filmmaker to a bigger canvas. There is an almost unprecedented vastness to the desert, which can seem peaceful until the cavalry arrives and turns it into a kind of wasteland prison. The use of a comparatively large budget (undisclosed) and whiz-bang technology (new and changing by the minute) also offers a level of hyper-realism that would have been unthinkable to filmmakers working with different tools or a shallower pocketbook.

We came in with two cameras thinking we'd block everything and then shoot it. And we realized that was very naive.

Emmanuel Lubezki, cinematographer

Beyond the question of the border story, whether documentary-style pieces are ideally suited for VR generally remains to be seen. Dropping a viewer into the action is one of the chief assets of the medium, making the documentary style a no-brainer.

Whether it also is the most compelling not to mention the most commercial approach is another matter. Given their resumes, Irritu and Chivo might have seemed likely to press a fictional narrative something live-action VR has been sorely missing though, when asked, the pair hedged on whether they'd try that next.

Still, the filmmakers seem well disposed to VR from a technical standpoint, having used 360-degree camera techniques in The Revenant and Birdman, in which they at once broke cinema's frame and worked within it. This time around they had no frame to break, just a cover-every-pixel process they described as being as vexing as it was liberating.

It's a completely different medium. You can't use the tools weve developed in film for over 100 years, Chivo said. We came in with two cameras thinking we'd block everything and then shoot it. And we realized that was very naive.

To hear the pair talk with fresh wonderment about the form the need for new grammar and the obsolescence of old techniques, the flouting of convention and the different rules of consumption is to listen to conversations that many in the VR community have long had and in a sense moved past.

Still, such remarks are noteworthy, offering a glimpse at the crossover dynamic that occurs when the artistic establishment in one form begins discovering another, like when rock musicians first stumbled upon an already thriving world of hip-hop beats.

Hollywood and VR still need to work out cultural differences too. The notion is highlighted by the unusual layers of Hollywood bureaucracy around seeing Carne at Cannes, which clashes with the informality and filmmaker accessibility that has until now characterized the space.

Even the simple matter of what to call these new pieces was complicated by the number of emails sent to journalists exhorting them to call Carne an art installation instead of a film.

Certainly the presence of Carne at Cannes makes for a complex juxtaposition. Much of the Sturm und Drang at the festival around digital technology has been centered on Netflix, which with two films in competition has provoked a backlash from French theater owners and plenty of headlines. But in a way, streaming services are not the real disrupters. They may upset theater owners, but they keep intact many of the film industry's long-standing rules and players. Hollywood in the Netflix age is doing what it has always done, it has just delivering film differently.

VR, though, upends the game much more significantly, changing the very way stories are told and since hardly every filmmaker is as game as Irritu and Lubezki who will tell them too. That is far more anathema to the ideology of Cannes, which reveres cinema and its masters like few others. This makes it all the more surprising that festival director Thierry Frmaux enthusiastically persuaded a skeptical Irritu to bring the piece here (at least as the filmmaker explained it), instead of the other way around.

If (when?) VR takes off as a storytelling medium, the idea of people gathering in plush theaters named after French artistic greats to watch two-hour slices of edited film could seem as quaint as the masses gathering for the latest Bizet debut.

In that regard, Irritu and Chivo are ahead of the curve when they say that VR could soon become a much bigger part of film fans' diet.

I think it could be less than 10 years when kids look at a movie on a [traditional] screen and say, You used to watch things on that? Chivo said.

In the meantime, filmmakers are ranging around to match content and medium.

We are using the highest technology to express the stories of the people treated like the lowest in society, Inarritu said. It is virtual reality to express a bad reality."

What other kinds of reality and whether it needs to be real at all still needs to be sussed out. Maybe at future festivals.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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Cannes 2017: Alejandro Irritu's virtual reality project is festival's true disrupter - Los Angeles Times

Bjrk is in Manhattan for the time being, but her avatar showed up in Los Angeles Friday as a surprise guest at a press confab to preview Bjrk Digital, a virtual-reality art exhibition thats having its west coast premiere in downtown L.A. through June 5.

Woo-woo! exulted an enthusiastic Bjrk, waving her arms after one of a handful of reporters inside the exhibits host venue, the Magic Box at the Reef, inquired whether the colorful, surreal image being seen on screen via Skype was really a live representation of Bjrk. (Director/collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang, who was present in the flesh, assured the assembled that her avatar was indeed a live motion-capture feed.)

Part of the idea of this project, said Bjork, has to move with the exhibition in as simple a way as possible the fact that it was just headsets that you put in an empty room, and the magic all happens inside the headsets. So we on purpose put nothing on the walls. Bjrk Digital has been exhibited in a few cities worldwide, but the L.A. engagement represents only its second installation in the U.S., following an American premiere in Houston last December.

My intention also is to reach intimacy with the listeners, and to show that there are so many different ways of being intimate, she said. And one of them is the VR. In certain ways its distant for sure, but in certain ways its even more intimate than a concert and even more intimate than a CD. That can be attested to by attendees who experience Bjrks in theirs, either as a realistic 2D figure or a computerized 3D animation.

Ushers shepherd ticketholders in small groups from room to room, which offer increasingly immersive experiences. The first room puts a virtual toe in the water, as patrons spend a few minutes playing around with a Biophilia app on iPads. Then the show really gets underway in a space where a video for Black Lake or two separate but closely related videos, actually can be seen on a pair of ultra-wide screens on opposite sides of the darkened room, which is decked out with 50 surround speakers.

Then begin the VR experiences, at first in 2D. Stonemilker, Quicksand, and Mouth Mantra all unfold in rooms with 24 stools each, allowing everyone to spin in a circle, at will, to take in 360-degree views of Bjrk by the Icelandic seaside, or in a starfield or from inside of her body. Mouth Mantra was filmed inside her mouth, offering a tongues-eye-view perspective of what Jonah or Pinocchio might have felt like, albeit with trippy special effects turning her teeth into swirly dominoes. (Warning: its during the literally cheeky Mouth Mantra that virtual-reality virgins may be likeliest to feel a little queasy.)

The climax of the exhibition comes as patrons are herded into two-person booths for a pair of 3D virtual reality videos, Family and Notget, this time standing up, with the headsets tethered overhead to keep you from wandering too far or bumping into your stallmate.

After that comes the last experience: a room with a lot of floor pillows and a two-hour loop of Bjrks older MTV-style videos. Even her earliest video work was groundbreaking, but watching something in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio after whats come before is a little like leaving Wonderland and settling down in front of a kinescope.

Actually, theres one more unofficial room: the merch space, a paradise for anyone who wants to pick up posters, T-shirts, deluxe vinyl, or, especially, her new 34 Scores book of sheet music for piano, organ, harpsichord or celeste, currently available only at the exhibition.

With the score book coming out now, thats also another side of me in which Im trying to be even more intimate with people, Bjrk explained. They can stay at home and play their piano and sing along with my songs with their loved ones, which we sort of do a lot in Iceland, especially after a couple of drinks or maybe its more screaming than singing, actually.

Bjrk Digital is being presented in conjunction with the L.A. Philharmonic, which is bringing her in to do a sold-out, one-off show at Disney Hall on May 30. There wont be any screens at that show, just reality-reality, she explained.

I kind of am very fond of extremes, as you probably noticed, she said. So thats going to be a 32-piece orchestra and me singing, and theres going to be no electronics; I decided to have no visuals, so its just all about the ears. And then Im going to come back in July with Arca, with a 15-piece orchestra for the opening night of the FYF Festival in Exposition Park on July 21 and were going to perform sort of stompers, if you will. Thats going to have a lot of visuals and surprises and special effects and more celebrational and outdoorsy and festive.

Shes spending the year performing in three different styles or settings, not counting the digital exhibition. I do these orchestra shows, which I feel are very intimate, to sing for two hours with just the strings, which is actually double harder and double more intimate because I cant really hide behind anything. Its very naked. And then I also really enjoy especially doing those festivals with Arca, where we play more of my old songs and its kind of more of a communal experience where you can lose yourself. Bjrk has also toured as a DJ, representing another side of me, which is music nerd. Ive got a pretty big record collection, and Im doing four-hour-long sets where I will start with world music or classical music and itll be a journey and usually end in some high-energy R&B bouncing or techno Ive been trying to break it up and not do it always the same way, and stay vulnerable, but also stay excited.

And after all this: I am right now starting to work on my next project. And it probably happens not on earth, partly. I dont want to give too much away, but yeah, probably, mm-hm, she said, chuckling as she cut her virtual revelations short.

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'Bjork Digital' Virtual-Reality Art Exhibition Arrives in Los Angeles ... - Variety

Is that a real Philip Treacy hat that our international fashion editor is wearing?

I know I should move, but which way should I go? I am standing inside an enormous hat, which if I reach out and touch it with hands which are not mine, yet are held by mine shatters into a million pieces. I feel half human, half robot and entirely discombobulated. This is my first experience of fashion VR.

VR means virtual reality. You know that, pretty soon, we'll be seated on our sofas at home strapped into our Oculus Rift headset and headphones while watching movies so immersive, that wildebeests will be stampeding across the carpet. As for how VR will work for fashion, everyone is, like me, taking baby steps. We know the potential for immersive experiences in a business of creativity is enormous. We just don't want to step off the cliff.

Will VR become the norm for huge advertising campaigns? Will you not only watch them, but experience them, be inside them? Perhaps you and your friends will soon head to the Westfield mall for a shared multi-sensory experience. China already has an emerging culture of social VR, with groups going to VR venues in the same way you would go bowling.

Perhaps the potential lies in in-store experience. Will there be people in headsets, walking through the Gucci store, experiencing a reality entirely unlike those who have just popped in to buy a sweater? While my experience involved walking around on my own two feet within an assigned space "wired up" for VR, will Positron Voyager chairs which look like giant eggs and have full motion and are already in use for cinematic VR become the norm in your nearest Chanel? Or will this technology lead us somewhere else entirely?

It is these sort of questions which were posed at South by South West (SXSW), the annual music and tech conference held in Austin, Texas, in March. SXSW is becoming of increasing interest to the fashion world: this year's speakers ranged from Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the internet, to Marc Jacobs, formerly creative director of Louis Vuitton.

Thus do I find myself in a three-metre-square area on the fourth floor of an ugly convention centre, yet thinking I am inside a Philip Treacy hat. I'm experiencing the world premiere of Spatium, created by film director Roland Lane and VR director Alex Lambert, in association with Inition, a leader in immersive technologies. Lane's aim is to push fashion imagery as far as it can go. No wonder then that for his fashion collaborator he went to Treacy, the milliner who has spent his whole career making the impossible possible.

The actual hat recreated in Spatium was first worn IRL (in real life) by Madonna. I appear to be wearing it now, which makes me question what is happening in my brain. It is all too "down the rabbit hole" for me; it blows my middle-aged mind.

When fashion collides with technology, it is always unsettling at first, like when water slams against land, because the two forces are each so powerful. Then they find harmony and it becomes normal. Like e-commerce.

The movie industry is ahead on this. Tom Cruise was at SXSW, virtually, with a zero gravity experience which had people not on the edge of their seats but thinking they were falling off them. Sadly, I wasn't savvy enough to book a Positron Voyager full-motion rotating chair in Ballroom B at the Austin Convention Centre in advance. But everyone who did Cruise's self-funded VR experience, apparently costing $US18 million ($24 million), said it was "awesome". For fashion, hang on to your hat and your headset. We, too, are in for an exciting ride.

International fashion editor Marion Hume is based in London.

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How will virtual reality affect fashion? - The Australian Financial Review

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Virtual reality app to teach road safety to children BBC News An app using similar technology to Pokemon Go is being developed to help teach road safety to primary school children. Pupils will be able to learn road-crossing skills through the "virtual reality" game. The app has been developed by University of ... and more »

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Virtual reality app to teach road safety to children - BBC News